Sessions May Face Scrutiny

Ten months after House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) ousted Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.) as the party’s top campaign strategist, House Republicans continue to be plagued by funding woes and ugly intraparty skirmishes that have hurt their ability to win elections over the past several years.

Cole was criticized for sluggish fundraising and a string of 2008 special election losses in Mississippi, Illinois and Louisiana during his tenure as National Republican Congressional Committee chairman — criticisms that Boehner leveraged to eventually unseat him in favor of Rep. Pete Sessions (Texas).

“We cannot allow our candidates or the NRCC to be outraised as badly as we were last cycle if we are to regain the House,” Sessions wrote to Members in a November 2008 letter during his campaign for NRCC chairman.

But two messy special elections later, the NRCC lags behind its Democratic counterpart as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican National Committee in fundraising — and the committee is more than $10 million behind where the Cole-led NRCC was at this point in the 2007 election cycle.

This disparity has caused several Members, staff and GOP political operatives to question whether Sessions has delivered on his commitment to excel where he thought Cole had failed.

“They have the same fundamental problems that they have had for years and years and years,” said one GOP source with knowledge about the inner workings of the NRCC.

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